Family Therapy
When your marriage or union is blessed with children…
You probably had all sorts of early visions of how things would be.
Like a partner whose parenting skill perfectly meshes with your own – everyone is on the same page.
You envisioned school mornings with everyone eating breakfast together, laughing, and working on a schedule to get out the door on time. Peaceful car rides with each child quietly reading, watching a show, or playing a game. After school, homework and chores get done promptly; after dinner, everyone knows what needs to be done to get to bed on time.
Peace and harmony with everyone working together, accepting each other, loving each other. (Man, I don’t think I can even work that miracle, lol.)
But we live in a complicated and sometimes traumatic world.
And these unexpected events can crash into your life, shattering all your hopes and dreams.
Maybe your child struggles at home or school because of a medical diagnosis or learning disability. Or perhaps they’re just different and getting bullied.
Your child might also suffer from low self-esteem, depression, or anxiety.
Sometimes, there are major changes like relocating to a new home, school, or community. New jobs, new schedules, and new expectations are all major disruptors for parents and their kids.
Or you may launch an older sibling into their new adult life. This is likely an exciting time, but it can also be a significant loss to younger siblings (and to you, too).
Divorce (even the most amicable ones) can negatively impact the kids. When a divorce is not friendly, it’s even worse. It may not even be your divorce but the divorce of grandparents, aunts, or uncles… or a parent that was married to a step-parent. Divorce is a highly emotional time that can overwhelm any typically competent parent.
Natural disasters are not common in Wisconsin, but we have fires and tornadoes that can upend a family.
Car (or other) accidents can cause fears in your family that can’t easily be overcome. These situations can make you feel isolated and unable to cope.
The unexpected loss of a family member is always hard on everyone. However, for kids, this may be the first time they’ve experienced death and create many questions. You expect yourself to be strong for your kids, but you’re crushed with your own emotions. You feel inept at making your kids understand the loss while still feeling safe.
Maybe, instead of a loss, there’s an addition to your family. The birth of a sibling, an adoption, or adding a foster child, grandparent, or another family member to the home can be a happy moment, or it can be scary or threatening. Plus, there are a lot of emotions and work for you.
How do you go about balancing the happiness of some and validating the uncertainty for others? What if it’s stressful for everyone involved? It can make you feel inadequate.
Problems like this can really affect your ability to parent effectively.
These stressors can negatively affect the course of a child’s social development.
Each developmental stage builds a sense of mastery and increases self-esteem in the child. If a stage is managed poorly, the child will emerge with a sense of inadequacy in that development stage.
Times like this are incredibly busy.
With the uncertainty of the pandemic, maybe your kids are bouncing in and out of school. Face to face some days or weeks and going virtual on others. It’s hectic trying to keep up or engage in extracurriculars such as sports, music, or other activities.
You’re working from home while also trying to keep your kids on task. The speed of life is making you feel like a rock in the rapids.
People have different ideas about what parenting should look like.
One believes in spanking while the other doesn’t. Mom thinks dad is too strict and authoritarian, while grandma insists that mom is too soft. Extended family members feel the need to express their opinions on how to get your children to listen or be respectful.
And when you aren’t listening to those extended family members, YOU are the disrespectful one! Families are connected, and each individual has his or her own ideas about what the problems (and the solutions) are. It can make you go bat-shit crazy!
I know you’re looking for answers… and fast!
At the speed of life, things are quickly spinning out of control. You know that kids have an uncanny way of blaming themselves for these situations, but you are unsure how to get them through this with as little emotional damage as possible.
You desperately want to get things back to “normal,” so your kids can look back on their childhood as a good experience… guided by competent parents on whom they could depend.
You’ve tried with little success to reconstruct that stability and normalcy, and now you’re looking for professional advice.
You don’t have to tackle this alone!
Family problems need the entire family to be part of the solution. So, if you’ve been trying to fix this problem alone, you now know you’ve been asking the impossible.
As a family therapist, I know how to get a family to work together. I have helped families make huge transformations that started with small, quick changes.
How? By creating an environment where everyone feels safe and validated. We’ll explore the situation from each family member’s perspective, uncovering the whole story, discovering everyone’s idea of the problem, and coming to a new understanding of those problems.
This creates an open forum for unique solutions that work for your family’s situation. Instead of only having parents come up with ideas to fix problems, we’ll address everyone’s problem as a “family team.” This validates and motivates individual members to create change.
Instead of a few ideas for solutions, we’ll include everyone’s ideas as potential solutions. This kind of inclusion stimulates people to make even hard changes. Even if you feel your family can’t possibly work together… at some level, they already do and can learn to do this more effectively with a little guidance.
Don’t spend another day asking yourself to do the impossible.
You’ll never make lasting change for your family by going it alone.
You are already doing things right… like looking at this website to get some answers.
Take the next small step to big transformations and call me today for a free 30-minute consultation call to see if we are a good fit: (262) 674-7009.